The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (21 page)

The refugees brought tales of whole families dying on the roads in the east, in villages and towns laid waste. People ate grass and the boiled bark of trees. The citizens began to talk of giving themselves up.

‘Mercy!’ stormed Smith. ‘You fools! The Tatars have half-starved them first! Now they drive them into the city, to swell our numbers, so we have more to feed. They bring empty bellies, disease, and most of all these tales of suffering, to break your spirits! You dolts. That is the nature of Devlet Giray’s mercy. He is a commander of infinite cunning.’

It was as Smith said. The refugees spread terrible tales of burned-out monasteries, the infidels drinking from the sacred vessels, plucking ornaments from holy images to wear as barbaric jewellery. They put hot cinders in the boots of monks and made them dance. They stripped young nuns and raped them laughing, cut off their noses and threw them down wells.

Another people might have found some resolve in such tales of atrocity, but the people here were already too demoralized and broken by their own oppression. A spokesman came to Vorotinsky saying that many of them wanted a truce.

‘Never!’ cried Vorotinsky. ‘The Czar himself commanded us to fight to the last.’

‘Then we will all die, all the city.’

‘So let it be,’ said Vorotinsky. ‘We are the people of God, we do not fear death.’

34

As dusk fell they stood on the thinly manned walls and saw a sight that chilled them.

‘It’ll warm us soon enough,’ said Nicholas.

Gun after gun was drawn up to face the south wall, and catapults and trebuchets now of every size. Incendiaries as before, but now they would rain down unceasingly until the whole city was one vast fire, and there were other more evil devices too. Greek fire pots, of subtle design, strong enough to withstand being hurled from a catapult, well wadded, and double-skinned. Some could even be fired from cannon, packed tight with rags and straw, so that they would not shatter but erupt from the barrel at high speed. Once launched into the air, the rags and straw naturally fell away and the fire pot streak high into the sky, to fall on the rooftops and into the streets of Moscow.

Soldiers in the German Wars called them Pandora’s boxes – for they contained all the sorrows of the world. Nails and sharp flints and stones, thick black oil from the Caspian shore, naphtha, sulphur, even sugary date wine to make the burning mixture stick to any surface it landed on. Such a mixture could even stick to the sides of galleys and continue to burn below the waterline, as Nicholas himself had seen. It stuck to living skin and continued to blaze, so that people ran screaming through the streets like human torches …

Devlet Giray had promised to burn Moscow to the ground, and now he meant it. He did not want any more testing or skirmishing, or talk of truce. He had lost patience. And he did not intend to lose more than a hundred men in this siege.

‘I hope to God they have taken to the cellars,’ said Smith.

‘I trust the whole city has,’ said Stanley. Indeed it was eerily quiet now, the streets deserted, even the emaciated refugees taken in and hidden.

‘What do we hope for?’ said Nicholas abruptly. ‘Truly? We will all burn.’

‘There will be chaos,’ promised Stanley. ‘In chaos there is opportunity, as they say in Cathay.’

Nicholas had just discerned the first star in the sky, towards the south-west – Venus, Goddess of Love, ah, heaven’s irony! – when the first guns roared out. He managed a sour grimace, and then the bombardment erupted with full strength.

Reeling, deafened, blinded, men shouting, a few scattered and impotent musket shots from the walls, Vorotinsky’s voice somewhere, hoarse and desperate. Through the mirk, a huge gout of black smoke and flame from one of the biggest guns, then a titanic roar and down below, the ominous sound of the entire south gate shivering and buckling, already splintering at its hinges, bulking behind collapsing back into rubble.

‘Below!’ cried Smith. ‘Vorotinsky, send me some men with pikes. Bulk her up again!’

At last it seemed the citizen militia were galvanized, by the sheer noise and terror of it if nothing else. There was no time left to reason.

Even as they raced down the steps, they heard the distant familiar thrum of catapults, and the strange, fiery roar of forty incendiary bales tumbling through the air above them and crashing down upon the city.

And then, almost immediately, another big gun roared out and another eighty-pound ball slammed into the reeling gate below.

Nicholas had his sword drawn already. This would last about an hour. And he was ready to run back to the English House at any moment.

Hodge nodded. ‘With you.’

Even as they scrabbled about behind the double gate, throwing crude lumps of rock back onto the pile, a team of militia trying and failing to put up a long timber prop, another monstrous gun was readying out there on the plain, lined up and calculated by the expert gunners to strike in exactly the same place as before. The glowing linstock lowered to the pan, then the gunnery team crouched down, hands over their ears, eyes closed. The dread pause, the hollow fizz – and then the bronze beast erupting backwards on its carriage against its restraining ropes, vomiting forth another stone or iron ball in a trumpet of smoke and flame.

‘Get back, Smith!’ roared Stanley.

This shot was so perfectly executed, the south gate simply surrendered before it, the loose bulking of rubble and timber behind it blasted to smithereens. As the smoke and the white dust gradually cleared, they saw the gate hanging clean off its hinges. The mighty ball had gone straight through the timbers of the gate and on into the city, half-demolishing a nearby house. From within they could hear desperate cries and screams.

A figure hauled himself up from the rubble, white with dust but for a red stain down his forearm. Smith. He raised and lowered his sword. Still working.

Then a huge cheer went up from the Tatar host, and at a single nod from Devlet Giray on his platform, the grim-faced generals raised their rods of command and a large party of cavalry began to gallop in across the plain, making straight for the ruptured south gate. Such confidence. They would enter the city through a single breach, not even troubling to break down two or three sections so that they could attack on several fronts at once. They knew. There was no soldiery here to speak of, and that wretched Czar was already fled, they knew exactly where to. They would pick him up later and make him pass under the yoke. Perhaps remove his eyes or his ears. They knew that his main army was tied down in the west. They knew everything.

A troop of some twenty pikemen came trotting down from the wall.

‘Line up before the gate,’ bellowed Smith, ‘pikes at the ready! We must hold them! They cannot gallop in over rubble!’

The musketeers on the walls also levelled their guns at the oncoming horde with trembling hands, but one was so young and inexperienced he lowered the muzzle of his long musket too far and the ball, inadequately wadded, simply rolled out of the barrel and fell to the ground far below.

Vorotinsky strode back and forth on the walls. ‘Reload, you dolt! No firing until I give the command! I want every shot to count!’

Nicholas and Hodge stood near Stanley. It was absurd, desperate, so let them fight with added desperation. Let them fight for that little square of home territory that was the English House, and that blithering idiot Waverley, Greene and his wife and three sweet children, old Southam and his slut wife, and of course for that girl. If the Tatars broke in and took Moscow – though how could they not? – all would perish or be enslaved.

And it needed little imagination to picture where Rebecca would end up. Nicholas saw it all with grim, cold fury. Repeatedly raped and then sold into slavery as a fair captive to some khan. Kept on if she fell pregnant and bore a son, but if she did not, turned out onto the steppes to die. And anyway, by thirty she would be accounted old in the eyes of her Tatar lord, and finished. Among the heathen of Asia, women were good only for bearing strong sons. If she gave him a daughter she would be disgraced, while he turned to fresher and younger captives yet, nubile virgins, those in the very first flush of womanhood. Twelve or thirteen was the age thought ideal by the devout Mohammedan. Their devil’s scripture itself, the Koran, pictured paradise itself as little more than a celestial brothel full of such compliant and ageless maidens.

He gripped the hilt of his sword, teeth clenched. Then let them try and take her.

‘Here they come!’ cried Smith.

The Tatar horsemen appeared in the gate, pressing through thirty abreast, and half the militiamen broke and ran. There was no order. Nicholas took in a mass of wild, jostling steppe warriors, fur hats as common as helmets, pointed kalpaks, slim long-handled axes shining and whirring, cruel lances, and much-favoured recurved bows. Some horsemen wearing war paint across their broad cheeks in bands of red, yellow and blue, some fighting naked to the waist and covered in tattoos and strange symbols. Some wore their raven black hair in long ponytails down their backs, their squat Asiatic horses hung with amulets and animal skulls.

They were a long way from Shropshire.

He dodged a blow from an axe and seized one horse by the reins and dragged it forwards over the rubble so that it stumbled and its rider slashed about clumsily, unbalanced, and he managed to drag the rider down and kill him. Stanley was crouching behind a fallen horse, blasting another rider down with his hefty handgun. Smith broke his sword and seized a pike and then broke that in half too, and was reduced to swinging it about him like a half pike, surrounded by horsemen …

But all the while the incendiaries kept falling, and the greatest noise now was the blazing inferno behind them that was Moscow. Stanley glanced back. ‘Nick – you and Hodge, back to the House! Cover your mouths!’

‘You too!’

‘We’ll follow!’

A stroke of luck came to them then. With the usual chaos of battle, an incendiary came down short and the huge, blazing bale tumbled straight into the back of the troop of Tatar horsemen before them. Immediately horses reared up screaming, and there was the stench of burning horsehair and Tatar riders flailing about with whips.

‘Fall back now!’ cried Smith.

They fled through burning streets, ducked low under the searing blaze of wooden houses, wet their kerchiefs again in a trough and ran on, half choked. At the end of the street, they had glimpsed Tatar horsemen, already ecstatic with battle madness, apocalyptic laughter, riding into the fire, killing everything.

The four had long since pulled off their steel helmets. Men’s heads could boil in them. The city was burning away to nothing before their eyes.

The noise of the firestorm roaring was more terrifying than anything, a continuous roar of such astounding volume that they could no longer hear each other, even when shouting. They were choked, blinded, the smoke burning blacker, the pitch roofs melting, dripping molten tar down around them … Ahead, Nicholas saw Smith drop to his knees and Stanley haul him up again. Was this the right street? Night and black smoke, like crawling through a cavern of hell. Nicholas’s lungs were seared, his eyes were red and inflamed and filled with tears, he could hardly see. They must get back to the house soon or they would choke and die here …

People ran back out of their burning houses, making for the river, or even climbed down ropes into wells. Many were burned. The four staggered now, not ran, past twisted shapes no longer human, charred bodies of dogs and cats, corpses unidentifiable and emaciated, the fat melted off them and puddled in the intense heat. Children like cinder dolls, and falling perpetually through the darkened air like strange snow, bright flaming motes, flakes of wood from the rooftops, scraps of cloth from the burned dead, carried up high by the heat of the flames and cooled and then falling back down into the city, silent and ashen white.

Nicholas glanced back at one point and a gust of wind parted for a moment the dense curtains of dark smoke, and he saw a sight he would never forget. To the north, at the heart of the burning and dying city, he saw the great red walls and towers of the Kremlin, its gold onion domes, seemingly untouched by the fire that was destroying the people it ruled over. An old Russian story.

Then there were Tatars ahead of them, surrounding a woman and child. She sank to her knees, and they crowded in and speared her and the infant where they knelt. One horseman slipped from his saddle with a long curved knife in his hand, ready to take scalps.

Smith bellowed out. A deranged figure still covered in white dust, red eyes blazing, still clutching a shattered pike in his mighty fist. Then the Tatars were riding down upon them, through the very inferno. Nicholas had never known so crazed a fight. Stanley had managed to keep and load his heavy German handgun, a clumsy matchlock, but no need now to have a smoking matchcord ready. He simply ripped a smouldering board from the side of the house and touched it to the pan and let it smoulder and then aimed two-handed. The big ball hit a Tatar horseman full in the chest and he reeled back. No more time to admire. Stanley thrust the gun home under his belt and they turned and ran, crouching low. The Tatar horsemen were momentarily slowed, unsure how many more guns waited for them round the corner, and then a change of wind blew a thick pall of smoke sidelong and enveloped them.

They could hear the Tatars’ coughing and choking even above the roar of the inferno.

‘Attack!’ cried Smith, running out.

Four of them, already half-suffocated, helmetless, not a loaded gun between them now, already carrying three or four injuries as well – against twenty or more fresh horsemen? Smith was wrong this time. Stanley brought him down with the kind of flying grapple you would see in a village football match. Hodge shouted out, ‘Get back in here, you bloody idiots!’ The two knights rolled in the dust a moment and then the smoke began to clear. The Tatars were riding down on them.

‘Here they come!’ cried Nicholas. ‘Back!’

They backed down a narrow alley and fought a desperate rearguard fight all the way. Stanley wielded a burning timber at one point, Smith used a wooden well-cover as a shield, the kind made of thick oak planking that usually took two men to lift. With incredible deftness and speed, Stanley managed to reload his handgun amid this mêlée and aim and take down another warrior. Nicholas saw his right shoulder explode in a red mist. Another warrior caught him off guard, trapped him against the wall with his horse, levelled an arquebus almost in his face, fired before Nicholas could duck – and misfired. In a trice Nicholas seized the arquebus by the barrel and pulled it from the startled horseman’s grasp and – an arquebus could weigh a hefty twenty pounds – shoved it back like a ram straight at the rider’s kneecap. A hideous crunch, an ­animal howl. The horse sidestepped, Nicholas dropped down against the wall and ducked beneath the horse and closed up with the others.

‘The back of the house! There!’ cried Hodge.

An arrow glanced off his shoulder, the point missing his ear by a whisker. ‘Bugger you!’ he hollered back.

And then Stanley glanced upwards and cried out something but the air was filled with noise and they didn’t hear. A burning house was coming down on them like a blazing red sea on the chariots of the Egyptians, drowning them and the Tatar horsemen in flame. They dropped everything and ran.